Exchange 2007 SP1 and Server 2008 information

wanted to share some of my findings with running Exchange 2007 SP1 on Server 2008. I’ve noticed and heard of several issues and information that I believe people should be cognizant about.

Here are the issues and general information I have heard of and experienced so far that seems to be valuable to share. If you disagree with anything I am sharing, have found it works in a different way for you, and/or want to include your findings and any tidbits of information you may have, please feel free to comment.

Hub Transport Server Role fails when IPv6 is disabled on that server – FIXED – If either of these 2 bullets occur, you need to fully disable IPv6 and not just uncheck it. This requires the same fix as the next section which discusses broken Outlook Anywhere.

If IPv6 is disabled prior to the installation of Exchange Server 2007, when installing the Hub Transport Server role, your Hub Transport Server role will fail to install

If IPv6 is disabled after the installation of Exchange Server 2007, you may experience some Exchange services failing to start

This bug consists of the fact that IPv6 is not listening on the loopback port 6004 (RPC/HTTP Proxy Service). This is causing Outlook Anywhere to fail with Outlook 2007. Not sure if this happens with previous versions of Outlook. The reason for this is because Server 2008 prefers communication using IPv6 over IPv4. Since IPv6 is not listening on port 6004, Outlook Anywhere will fail.

NTLM seems to be very buggy with Outlook Anywhere. There are lots of reports of Outlook Anywhere NTLM Authentication not being functional when using Server 2008. More information can be found from the following URL: https://blog.aaronmarks.com/?p=65FIXED in Release Update 8 for SP1 – Update to latest Rollup/Service Pack or type the following command: %Windows%\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config /section:system.webServer/security/authentication/windowsAuthentication /useKernelMode:false

OAB Generation fails on Server 2008 Clusters. More information can be found from the following URL: https://www.spyordie007.com/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=25FIXED in Release Update 5 for SP1 – Update to latest Rollup/Service Pack. You may also need to deploy the following hotfix for Server 2008 clusters here in which more information about this hotfix and what it fixes available here.

20 ms latency – All the log files were shipped over properly and all CCR databases auto-mounted properly

30-40 ms latency – Some manual mounting will be required to mount all your databases as the latency will prevent all logs to be shipped over fast enough for automatic mounting

50+ ms latency – Log shipping mechanism was out of control

In regards to SCR and the network latency topic. SCR is a manual failover mechanism. Because of this, CCR is a lot more dependent on network latency due to its automatic failover mechanism. Microsoft does provide recommendations on how to tune SCR for latency on the Exchange Technet Library which can be found here. The problem here is the article is geared for Server 2003 Networking. As for real world SCR scenarios, I have been told that a mailbox server that contains ~6,000 mailboxes has been successfully failed over to an SCR target across the world over a 200 ms link.